·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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A handful of our students volunteer long hours each week to crank out the weekly school paper.  They work out of an old sandwich shop that has been converted into a student publications office in the basement of one of the dorms.  Their adviser is a former newspaper lady that puts in a lot of effort to help them produce a professional looking rag.

After a recent grant money ordering fiasco, we found ourselves with some leftover play money to burn.  We decided to help these dedicated folks out with some new gear for student publications.  They had been using some much older PCs that were underpowered for their needs with Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.

Needless to say, the students were thrilled with the new machines and I think the upgrade has made them more productive.  We even helped them rearrange the office when we delivered the gear.

I stopped in one night while they were hard at work on the next issue.  I was amazed at how seriously they took their work – it was like standing in a real world newsroom.  For me, this is another example of how good technology on campus can make a big difference for students, and something that our IT staff can be proud of having made better.

We maintain several traditional computer labs on campus.  These are your run-of-the-mill labs with PCs as you would expect, imaged with our standard lab software build.

Over the last year, two of our labs have gone in completely opposite directions.  One uses high end workstations with demanding software, where each desk is packed with specialized peripherals.  The other contains thin client terminals with just enough brains to run a remote desktop session to a virtual machine on a server.  Both have been an interesting exercise in fulfilling the needs of faculty and students.

On the thick side, we have the Fine Arts Technology, or FAT lab.  The FAT lab offers software and devices for audio recording/editing, photography editing, video recording and drafting/design.  This lab has a special place in our hearts because we have spent so much time in it!

Our Fine Arts division chose a vendor to build this lab, one that supposedly specialized in labs for music and art instruction.  To make a long story short, the vendor laid a great big egg, leaving our IT staff to pick up the pieces.

The eventual result is a set of dual quad-core workstations, each with 8GB of memory, SAS disks and dual displays.  They dual boot 32 and 64 bit Windows XP because some of the software must run on a 32 bit platform (M-Audio’s Pro Tools and Adobe Premiere CS3)  while some can take advantage of 64 bit processing and memory over 4GB (Adobe Photoshop CS4, Autodesk’s AutoCAD).  The vendor’s biggest mistake (and there were several) was thinking that everything would run OK on 64 bit Windows.

On the lighter side, we have a lab space that is used as much as a classroom as it is a computer lab.  It was a traditional lab in the past, but needed to be quieter and have a smaller footprint on the desks so that it could be used for lectures.  We retrofitted this one with thin clients and began calling it the THIN lab.

The THIN lab is used for Business and Economics courses.  It once had standard desktop PCs, each with a flat panel monitor sitting on top of it.  This arrangement brought complaints from faculty about not being able to make eye contact with students during lectures, not to mention that students would sometimes turn the computers on and use them.

This lab became our testing ground for thin client computing.  We removed the desktop PCs and installed Wyse S10 thin clients at each station.  We took the “poor man’s” approach, installing the free VMWare ESXi solution on some older servers and creating a virtual machine out of our lab image to back each client.  When a Wyse client boots, it gets its configuration from an FTP server and opens an RDP session to an XP lab image VM.

The experience is quite similar to sitting at a standard lab PC, with the obvious exceptions that video and audio do not perform well over a remote session.  We were willing to take that chance because we knew that the software required for the courses did not make use of multimedia.  Also, the lab is lightly used by students outside of class time.

This setup lowered the monitors down on the desk, freed up writing space for students and completely silenced the room (the S10 terminals have no fan or disk).  Some courses do make use of the clients during class time, as there is auditing simulation and tax software installed on their VMs.  We completed this installation over holiday break, so we are just starting to get some feedback on the “thin experience”.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog entry about how I didn’t like technology anymore because it was just too complicated and hard to keep up with.  Indeed there are days when it feels like there is no end to the amount of work that we must do just to keep everything up and running.

Thankfully, putting together these two labs has reminded me of why I enjoy it.  It is heartening to see how technology can enhance teaching and learning in so many ways.  It really makes me feel good about the job and proud of the work that we’ve done.

1,330 calories, 86 grams of fat, 3,150 milligrams of sodium.  Welcome to America!

People, the fence should follow the curve of the ground.  If you want it level across the top, then cut the boards to match.  Otherwise, you will end up with a gaping hole and *dare I say it* chicken wire at the bottom like this, which looks hideous:

Notice that they DID follow the curve of the ground on the back side, but not the side facing the street!  WOOF.

I like to say that the IT staff knows where everything is – we find ourselves in every closet, basement and dark space on campus.  As a result, we often discover little surprises that other people perhaps thought would never be seen… like this switch and thermostat above the tile ceiling in one of the computer labs.  We were moving a projector and running new cables to it when we discovered these jewels.

Faculty members have often complained about the temperature in this lab – no kidding!  It was set to 77 degrees!  Pretty sure that having a switch in the ceiling is not up to code, either (not to mention that I have no idea what it controls).  But never fear!  The IT staff is full service, so we ran the thermostat down the wall and put it next to a light switch where they can actually use it.

Never a dull moment!